PGC Favourite Books as a Child

This week we’ve been asked to discuss our favourite books as an Adult/Child.
I decided to choose two books from my Childhood.

I will briefly tell you the stories so if you don’t like spoilers, don’t read on.

So first up we have The Paper Bag Princess. The story is of young Princess Elizabeth destined to marry Prince Ronald. She is head over heels in love with him and he…..basically loves himself!
Then a Dragon comes along, destroys her castle, burns everything she owns including her clothes and carries away Prince Ronald.
Elizabeth decides to rescue Ronald but can only find a paper bag as a form of clothing.
After she outwits the Dragon, she find Ronald who appears to be completely fine! He is disgusted with Elizabeth’s appearance and demands her to go and make herself more presentable.
Elizabeth basically tells the Prince that he’s beautiful on the outside but ugly on the inside. They don’t get married and there’s a picture of Elizabeth skipping off into the sunset.

I have read reviews where people have found this book to be anti-feminist and old fashioned. I disagree, I think it’s the complete opposite. It goes against the stereotype of the Prince rescuing the Princess and reverses the roles. Then instead of brute force or killing, the Princess uses intelligence to outwit the Dragon so that he’s too tired to fight. Lastly when the Prince rejects her after her heroic act, she realises that she’s better off without him anyway!

The second book is Winnie the Witch. It’s about a Witch who lives in a black house and everything inside the house is black. Everything! Even her cat Wilbur, apart from his green eyes. In contrast, Winnie herself is very colourful.
The story is about her constant losing of Wilbur, she can see him when his eyes are open but not when they are closed. This results in poor Wilbur being sat on and multiple trips/falls for Winnie. She gets so fed up that she changes the colour of his fur. Firstly he changes to green, which is fine until he camouflages with the grass outside (more trips and falls). He’s then changed to multiple colours, which causes him great shame. Winnie feels bad, changes him back to black and decides instead to cast a spell to create colour in her house.

What I loved about this book when I was little (apart from the fact it had a witch and a cat) was the illustrations. There was a lot of detail in the drawings that kept me busy studying the pages. I must admit, I did giggle when the poor cat was squished on the chair as well!

There were loads of other books I loved as a child but I will leave it at those two for now.